Clinics recruit clients to pad numbers

Pat Thomas has lunch in Grandview Retirement Home’s dining facility. She says she believes God made five of her. One of them is Beyoncé. She is also actress Brooke Shields, former Elvis Presley girlfriend Ann-Margret and singer Etta James. CREDIT: Richard Hartog/The Center for Investigative Reporting

Pat Thomas has lunch in Grandview Retirement Home’s dining facility. She says she believes God made five of her. One of them is Beyoncé. She is also actress Brooke Shields, former Elvis Presley girlfriend Ann-Margret and singer Etta James. CREDIT: Richard Hartog/The Center for Investigative Reporting

One of them is Beyoncé. She is also actress Brooke Shields, former Elvis Presley girlfriend Ann-Margret and singer Etta James – not actually dead, she says.

And then there is “the first one,” as she calls herself: Pat Thomas, a woman with no teeth who sits alone in a wheelchair in the dreary courtyard of a Los Angeles board-and-care home, smoking cigarettes and battling nightmarish visions.

“The other ones go places,” Thomas, who’s in her early 60s, said of her other identities. “The first one don’t go nowhere.”

That’s why Thomas cherished the days when vans would pull up to take her and other residents to drug and alcohol rehab.

Thomas didn’t go for the therapy. She said she’s been drug-free for a couple of years. She went, she said, for a temporary escape and perks like cigarettes and cash doled out by the clinics.

A recent investigative series by The Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN uncovered rampant overbilling in California’s publicly funded drug rehabilitation system for the poor. It prompted a state crackdown that has cut funding to 177 Drug Medi-Cal clinic sites so far and opened dozens of Department of Justice probes.

But even as clinics are shut down, others are filling in, picking up some of the same mentally impaired residents for counseling they may not need or understand.

Dilapidated sober living houses and bed bug-plagued homes for the elderly and mentally disabled offer one-stop shopping for clients like Thomas – willing to come along for the ride whether they have addictions or not.

Each warm body is a renewable resource, representing about $27 in government funding for a group counseling session and $64 for a one-on-one appointment. It adds up.

Clinics employing the tactic have collected tens of millions of dollars a year, a CIR review found. The demand for Medi-Cal-eligible clients has created a competitive marketplace in which clinics bribe residents to attend counseling and pay kickbacks to home operators, according to government records and interviews with former clinic staffers.

The practice is one of a variety of schemes targeting board-and-care residents on public assistance, said Molly Davies, coordinator of elder abuse prevention and long-term care ombudsman programs in Los Angeles.

“It’s exploiting them,” Davies said. “It’s a little bit like Hansel and Gretel, luring them in with something that they want so that you can take advantage of them and make them, in some respects, part of the fraud.”

Michael Farkas-Jones used to pick up Thomas and fellow residents of Grandview Retirement Home, a 216-person complex for the elderly across the street from MacArthur Park.

Farkas-Jones was a van driver and counselor for Changing Steps and Clean & Free – two clinics run by the same person out of the same squat building in South Los Angeles. He remembered that Thomas was brought to both programs for years, even though she didn’t belong there. Farkas-Jones said his bosses told him to make up counseling notes about how she and others were benefiting from treatment.